[WikiEN-l] Query for all harassment-related proposals: How are you different from BADSITES?

[Will Beback]

Alec Conroy wrote:
> How would your policy prevent incidents like MakingLights  and the
> MichaelMoore from happening again in the future?
>   

It's a good idea to check any proposals against real-world incidents. 
But you should enlarge your list to cover more severe cases of 
harassment. The MichaelMoore issue barely even counts.


> ----------------
> DISCLAIMER:
>
> Just to remind us all, I'll recap the Making Lights saga, but I won't
> name the person who was involved, and I sincerely would ask everyone
> else not to criticize someone today for something they did months ago.
>  Seriously.  We've all made mistakes, they're over and done with, and
> I _sincerely_ am not trying to relive this past saga--  I just don't
> want to relive it in the future either.
>
> Ordinarily, I'd use a hypothetical example here, but I've found that
> in this debate, hypothetical examples are invariably dismissed when
> someone says  "Oh, that could never really happen".  So I actually do
> have to use a real-world example if we're going to talk about this.
>
>   
You protest too much. An example with more severe harassment would 
perhaps be more useful. Also, if you don't include the whole story then 
it doesn't make a good example.

Not coincidentally, you've picked a story that involves me. The fact 
that I'm an administrator has nothing to do with what happened, except 
that administrators are more likely to be the subject of harassment 
arising out of the actions they take on-Wiki. In this instance, working 
to maintain Wikipedia policies made me the target of a blogger prominent 
in the SciFi community. The blogger repeatedly asked me to stop 
interfering with her efforts to smear her opponents and to add positive 
material to the articles about herself, her husband, and their projects. 
When I persisted she turned to off-Wiki harassment, using her blog to 
first criticize using crude personal remarks, then to reveal private 
information. She found the information by digging through material 
deleted from Encyclopedia Dramatica - material ED had been conscientious 
enough to remove.

When I discovered the personal information I checked current WP policy 
and it said that links to attack sites may be removed without limit. I 
interpreted the combination of personal attacks and outing to be 
sufficient to categorize the blog as an attack site. I was probably 
wrong, based on the responses. I was also wrong in acting on my own as 
opposed to bringing it the community or at least an uninvolved editor. 
And it would have been far better to contact the blogger first to seek a 
diplomatic resolution, a resolution which was ultimately accomplished 
soon after.

The points I think we can take away from this is that we need a policy 
with clear definitions and clear procedures so that someone in my 
position knows how to proceed. It should include a procedure for having 
a 3rd party or group investigate the problem.


>
> My questions for Will Beback, or anyone else in the future who
> proposes a new policy that forbids all links to "sites that contain
> attacks" are this:
>
> #1.  Do you agree that the Making Light case was an abuse of power (or
> at least, incorrect.  .-- i.e. Do you agree Making lights should NOT
> have been purged)?
>   
The blogger abused her power to harass Wikipedia editors. Should her 
self-published website have been removed as a result, or should she have 
been "rewarded" by adding more links to it?
> #2. And if so, how will your new proposed policy prevent this sort of
> abuse when the old policy was unable to.  That is-- if we all
> magically decided to enact your policy today, what's to stop you (or
> me, or anyone) from turning around tomorrow and having a complete
> repeat of this whole fiasco tomorrow.
>   
Let me ask you - will your proposal prevent bloggers who edit Wikipedia 
from using their blogs to settle on-Wiki disputes?

-Will